I'm Mohsen, a PhD student working with Prof. Ralph Johnson at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). Ralph is a co-author of the seminal book on design patterns (GoF) and his research group has a history of important contributions to IDE's.

Our team [1] is studying how developers interact with the Eclipse IDE for evolving and maintaining their code. We found some Eclipse project files at the source code repository of ps3mediaserver. This probably indicates that some of you use Eclipse for Java programming. Therefore, we are inviting you and would greatly appreciate and value your participation and help in our research study.

To participate you should be at least 18 years old and use Eclipse Helios for Java development. As a participant, we ask that you complete a short survey and install our Eclipse plug-in called CodingSpectator [2].

CodingSpectator monitors programming interactions non-intrusively in the background and periodically uploads it to a secure server at UIUC. To get a representative perspective of how you interact with Eclipse, we would appreciate if you could install CodingSpectator for two months. Rest assured that we are taking the utmost measures to protect your privacy and confidentiality.

Your participation will help us greatly as we try to better understand how developers interact with their IDE's so we can propose improvements which fit better with their mindsets.

Thanks in advance for your time! Please do not hesitate to contact me (mvakili2@illinois.edu) if you have any questions or comments. More information can also be found at our FAQ [3]. Feel free to forward this invitation to anyone who might be interested in participating in this study.